Standing, Efficiently Justified

Jul 01, 2017

EasyStand’s new Justify It aims to help clinicians create comprehensive Letters of Medical Necessity.

Standing is multi-purpose, capable of improving functions from respiration and digestion to range of motion and bone integrity. Fittingly, EasyStand’s new Justify It tool succeeds on many levels as well.

Justify It’s main goal is to simplify the laborious process of creating Letters of Medical Necessity (LMNs) and produce a comprehensive letter to maximize funding success. But Justify It also invites collaboration between suppliers and clinicians, and has a product Configurator — all while keeping medical information secure.

Fully Functional

Marketing Manager Kyle Smith said HIPAA compliance was “foremost” on EasyStand’s mind during Justify It’s creation. But so was making this new tool fully functional.

“In the past with other services,” Smith said, “most of them suggested you do not input any protected health information without first signing a business associate agreement, which you had to do offline.”

Justify It avoids that kind of interruption. Go to the EasyStand Web site (easystand.justifyit.com), and you can sign a business associate agreement as part of the Justify It registration process, without leaving the Web site. Registration takes little more than a minute.

“It was something we take extremely seriously,” Smith said of HIPAA compliance. “We have an extraordinarily secure server in a locked cage with keycard-only access. It’s a HIPAA tier of security that we have, from hosting on through the system on our Web site.”

Despite those challenges, Justify It had to be comprehensive in function.

“If you couldn’t complete the entire process, if you couldn’t generate a ready-to-submit letter,” Smith said, “then how are we really saving anybody any time?”

Clinician Control

Justify It is an LMN tool that takes a clinician from configuring the stander to adding information such as the client’s medical history and standing plan.

“If a clinician has all the information at their fingertips — they’ve done the evaluation and all that goes with it — if they start Justify It and can complete all the prompts that pop up, they should literally be able to print that letter and submit it,” Smith said.

But the clinician controls the narrative: “This tool doesn’t limit a clinician’s clinical judgment,” Smith said. “It doesn’t write any of the letter for them. What it does is walk step by step through the process, prompting them each step of the way. So first, they don’t have to think of that outline in their head; trying to formulate that outline takes a lot of time. Second, you can’t miss any critical piece of information.”

Justify It starts with the product Configurator. Choose the product you want — we used the popular EasyStand Evolv for our demo — and the Configurator takes you through various options and component choices.

“If I choose front swivel casters, the justification box pops up underneath it,” Smith said. “It’s prompting me to justify that particular component, and then it provides a sample justification in red, below, in case this is the first time I’ve ever prescribed this particular component. But I must type my own justification.”

The Configurator combats what Smith called an underfunded approval, “where the payor funded the base unit, but didn’t fund the tray. Or they didn’t pay for laterals, because they weren’t justified. When you’re [doing] an LMN, you need to justify each component not included in the base price. This walks you through configuring the unit, and it has conditional logic so it only presents options that are compatible with previous selections. You can’t configure a product incorrectly.”

Colleague Collaboration

Many clinicians will use Justify It on their own. But the system also encourages collaboration with suppliers.

“They’re the product experts who will come in and help with the evaluation, help to select the correct options,” Smith pointed out. “We wanted the supplier to be able to go through and do the configuration without putting in the medical justification.”

A supplier who completely configures a stander can preserve the information via a “Save & Continue Later” function. Justify It creates a unique token that’s good for 30 days and is password protected, Smith said. The supplier can then send the configuration to the clinician.

“As long as you’re a registered user, you can log in, go to your e-mail and open up that saved configuration. Now you can put in the medical justifications for that particular configuration,” Smith said. “If the supplier does the configuration and hands that off to the clinician, then the clinician is going to be the only person dealing with protected health information. Because the configuration has zero identifying data until the clinician inputs that, there’s no [privacy] issue.”

After the stander is configured, the clinician inputs client information such as medical conditions, prognosis, standing program goals, and least costly alternatives that were ruled out. Then Justify It brings the Configurator and the client information portions of the letter together to form a comprehensive LMN.

EasyStand is conducting Webnars (see its Web site) to introduce clinicians and suppliers to Justify It. EasyStand Funding Specialist Nancy Perlich, COTA, ATP, said, “Justify It is about making sure the clinician writes a complete LMN, so as not to miss any of the critical justification elements that should be in every LMN. Sure, it speeds up the process. But forcing clinicians to review and document information as simple as Height and Weight or as complex as Other devices considered is what excites me the most.“

The number of LMNs I’ve seen that are missing important data is over 80 percent. Hopefully, this tool will help to change that.”

This article originally appeared in the July 2017 issue of Mobility Management.